The journey from science fair to university

How do you build public speaking prowess, stellar research and writing skills and possibly figure out what you want to do with your life — all before you even start university?

Embrace the youth science fair! This according to two University of Calgary students (and science fair gold medallists) who not only maximized every moment of their science fair years, but also continued to build on those experiences at university.

Last year, as a Grade 12 student, Mehul Gupta won the Calgary Youth Science Fair’s top prize, the University of Calgary’s Chancellor’s Bursary, valued at $2,500, for his project on a type of brain cancer. His full project name was Minimally Invasive Diagnosis of AT/RT (atypical teratoid rhabdoid tumour). This year, Gupta is a first-year UCalgary student pursuing a Bachelor of Health Science at the Cumming School of Medicine.

There are two main things from science fair that have helped Gupta succeed in university. “First, science fair is entirely self-driven. You are going out and trying to investigate something you see in the natural world and I think university caters to that a lot more — especially for a Bachelor of Health Sciences, which is all about self-directed research. Science fair really helped prepare me for that. Second is skill development. Science fair is all about having confidence in your public speaking and the written word and all of that is really transferable to your university education — doing presentations, writing reports and papers. It really helped.”

Transition from science fair competitor to judge

Gupta is back at the Calgary Youth Science Fair this year, but on the other side, as a judge. “It should be less nerve-wracking,” he says with a laugh. “It will be nice to encourage students to pursue science and help them see how the learning you do can be applied to the real world.”

Mehul is part of a contingent of more than 125 University of Calgary faculty, staff and students who make up a roster of 600 judges and other volunteers for the Calgary Youth Science Fair.

This summer, Gupta’s high school science fair experiences are coming full circle: He will be back in the lab at the Alberta Children’s Hospital where he first worked on his gold medal-winning science fair project. Working under his mentor, Dr. Gerald Pfeffer, an assistant professor of clinical neurosciences and medical genetics at the Hotchkiss Brain Institute, Gupta will be developing and testing a pharmaceutical drug to treat different types of paediatric brain cancers that could increase patients’ quality of life. It’s a paid summer job through the university’s summer research studentships.

“It’s $6,000 for the summer, so that’s not too shabby,” he says. “I chose a fantastic mentor with my science fair project and I have been able to keep that connection since then and hopefully I will be able to continue to keep it through my undergrad and postgrad career as I work to become a neuroscientist,” Gupta says.

Sarah Hyslop reflects on the importance of her science fair years

Sarah Hyslop is a science fair veteran. She participated in the Calgary Youth Science Fair for eight years. Her microbiology-focused projects on everything from bats to plant oils to horseshoe crabs were gold-medal finishers four years in a row — and took her to the national Canada-Wide Science Fair from 2009 to 2012. She also competed at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in 2013.

Hyslop is now a fifth-year geology student in the Department of Geoscience in the Faculty of Science. She already has her geology earth ring and she is gearing up to graduate this spring before she starts a geology job in downtown Calgary this fall.  

When Hyslop was trying to decide what to study in university, she turned to her science fair experience. “It was a toss-up between studying cellular and molecular biology — which would have been a really close follow with the science fair stuff — and geology,” she says. “How that worked out is I knew that if I went into bio I would be doing similar research to the lab work I had already been doing in high school. I knew that to be able to really do what I wanted in biology that I would need a PhD, and at that time I wasn’t sure I really wanted to do a PhD. And I was really interested in geology and I knew that could do a lot with a bachelor’s. Now ironically, after I work for a while as a geologist, I might end up doing a master's or PhD.”

Science fair experience reverberates years later

Still, Hyslop’s final geology research project had a biological tie — and she credits her experience doing in-depth science fair research with inspiring her to sign up for Geology 510, a year-long senior thesis. Her invertebrate paleontology-focused project looked at a community of unusually large fossilized sponges in rock formations near Banff. “It’s right before the end Permian extinction and nothing else is alive at that time, which is very strange, so there are big implications for what might be happening with climate change. And how we can apply that to today,” she says.

This year, she will be back at the Calgary Youth Science Fair as a volunteer helping to hand out medals. “I haven’t been able to judge because of conflicting times with my end-of-year classes, but it’s exciting to award the medals,” she says. “Going back to science fair is so much fun that I’ve kind of used it as a break from studying for finals. One year, I went and wandered around all the projects right before I had a final and it just made me feel like I was in this happy place. It was a good way to start off finals and clear my head ahead of exams.”

For Hyslop, one of the biggest things science fair helped her with is developing confidence and presentation skills — to the point where she hasn’t been worried about doing class presentations in university. “In science fair we never really used cue cards or anything, and a lot of people my age still do, and that’s totally fine. But I just grew up not needing that. That’s a big thing in jobs, in the oil industry, you are going to have to present your work,” she says.

Also, the high school years she spent working in labs on her science projects with PhD supervisors gave her more confidence to talk to senior scientists. “That’s a big thing, to not be worried about looking silly in front of them or being scarred to contribute ideas even when I was a lot younger.”